Tag Archives: Ahmed

Ahmed Mohamed and his family are moving to Qatar.

Mohamed’s sister, Eyman, reportedly confirmed that the family will only be in the U.S. for a few more days before relocating to Doha. Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, the teen’s controversial father, added that he looks forward to moving his children to a nation in which they “can study and learn” while “being accepted by that country.”

Eyman Mohamed asserted that Qatar is “basically like America,” noting that the decision to move was based on a generous offer her brother received from the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. “Our family has been overwhelmed by the many offers of support we have received since the unfortunate incident of Ahmed’s arrest,” a family statement explained.

I have no idea why she thinks Qatar is “basically like America,” but that’s beside the point.

I’ve known several exceptionally intelligent boys and girls in my lifetime who would now be young or middle-age men and women. I hope I had some beneficial influence on several of them, possibly encouraging an interest in science or technology. Or, at least, education. In the long run, it’s usually difficult to be sure. I would have loved to have met Ahmed.

Unfortunately, he will apparently be lost to the United States; and that’s a crying shame. We need to keep our brightest students and encourage them to complete their education here and help make our nation great again. It is insane to drive them somewhere else to help make some other country great instead!

Here are both sides of the story, though a little short on facts. But that’s OK. We’ve already heard the facts about 17 zillion times in the past few days.

For some reason, Fox News brought in a lying racist who had already been thrown off the police force for racist comments and perjury to tell the school’s and cops’ side of the story. Then Megyn couldn’t keep from laughing at his dumb remarks. (For background, see here and here.)

A former police officer — who was booted off the force for racist comments and perjury — was on the receiving end of some mockery from Fox News host Megyn Kelly after he said that 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was to blame for his arrest by Texas police because he was “passive aggressive.”

According to all reports, there was no passive aggression. There was no aggression of any kind. Everybody seems to agree that when he was asked about his gadget, he said it was a clock; but the cop said his answer was not reasonable. Go figure.

This kid put a few scrap electronic parts together and made a digital clock. It wasn’t very neat, but it worked.

He was proud of what he had done, so he took it to school to show his engineering teacher. If I had been he, I would have done the same thing.

His confidence in his engineering teacher was evidently well placed. The teacher expressed his approval, but advised Ahmed not to show it to anybody else. Ahmed followed his advice and didn’t show the clock to anybody else until he was required to. But it beeped at an inopportune time.

His English teacher heard a beep, asked what it was, and demanded to see the clock. She said it looked like a bomb and notified the principal, who called the police, who came and arrested Ahmed and took him away in handcuffs.

Ahmed was described as a model student who had never been in trouble before. Do you think maybe somebody besides his engineering teacher should have thought maybe he was telling the truth?

So okay, the English teacher thought it looked like a bomb. Here’s the alleged “hoax bomb.” Do you see any sticks of dynamite? Do you see any glob of clay that might have been an explosive? Me neither. All I see is a mess of wires and electronics stuff. Wires and electronic stuff don’t usually explode.

I guess maybe an English teacher — or some English teachers — just wouldn’t know. She had to use her best judgement. But Ahmed already had a reputation for building “crazy contraptions” like this.

Last year he attended Sam Houston middle school, where everyone knew him as the kid who makes crazy contraptions. His classmates brought him electronics to fix and even bought some of his gadgets. He had an identity. He was the Inventor Kid.

Ahmed didn’t invent the clock, as some have reported. Clocks were invented centuries ago. Electronic digital clocks were invented decades ago. But he built a clock, using a lot of wire. That’s all it was.

Nobody thought it was a bomb. They said it looked like a “hoax bomb.” There was no evacuation of the school. They just thought putting a really smart kid with the potential to accomplish a lot of good for our country in handcuffs it was a good idea. I disagree.

Fourteen-year-old MacArthur High School freshman Ahmed Mohamed, of Irving, Texas, just a few miles from where I live, is reputedly a model student who has been awarded a prize for his robotics studies and who (as far as I can determine) has never been in trouble before. Ahmed made the mistake of trusting his respected teachers to understand when he took a digital clock he had made from various electronic parts to school to show them. They didn’t. They thought it was a “hoax bomb.”

His hobbies are robotics and electronics, and he is good at them. How many 14-yo kids do you know who can create a digital clock out of a few scrap electronics parts? OK, how many 40-yo men or women do you known who could do it? I’d be proud, too. Understandably, so is his father.

Speaking at an afternoon news conference outside the family’s home, Ahmed’s father said he’s proud of his son and wowed by his skills.

Teacher betrayed Ahmed’s trust

His teacher confiscated the clock and contacted the principal, who called police. Ahmed was arrested, searched, and taken away in handcuffs. At the police station, he was interrogated, fingerprinted, and mug-shot before they would even let him call his parents.

The arresting officer later claimed Ahmed had refused to answer their questions or tell them anything that made sense, even though everybody seems to agree he told them repeatedly the device was a clock, and not a bomb.

What’s maybe even harder to understand is that nobody even thought it was a bomb. They thought it was a pretend bomb. A “hoax bomb.” There were no lockdowns or evacuations, and Ahmed was released to his parents several hours later.

Pamela Geller chimes in

The odious and loathsome Pamela Geller, who habitually and intentionally does her best to stir up trouble between Muslims and non-Muslims, has predictably chimed in. She claims this whole thing was a “setup” to prepare for a big lawsuit, since the family has now retained a lawyer. How stupid can she be? I’d retain a lawyer, too. Then I’d sue the pants off of them.

She accused Ahmed’s father of being a trouble-maker,when he has apparently done nothing more than speak his opinion. As I am doing now. As all Americans have a right to do. Including Muslim Americans. It’s called freedom of speech, and we all have it!

As if there were a connection, she mentioned the event in Garland, Texas, a few months ago, where two Islamic extremists were killed as they assaulted the hall with murderous intent. There is no reported evidence that either Ahmed or his father is an extremist, or that they have any violent or dangerous tendencies. She also neglected to mention that she herself had organized that event specifically for the purpose of badgering Muslims. It was a Mohammed cartoon-drawing contest, shortly after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France. And wasn’t it held next door to a mosque? I think so. Talk about asking for trouble!

So does that justify attempted murder? Of course not. And the local Muslims gave her no trouble. The terrorists came in from out-of-state. They were clearly responsible for their own deaths at the hands of a local policeman.

Pamela Geller was within her legal rights to deliberately antagonize the local Muslims, but having a right doesn’t make it right. It makes her a bigot and a leader of bigots.

Governor Abbott chimes in

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said later that police were mistaken to arrest Ahmed. He added,

The last thing we want to do is put handcuffs on a kid unjustifiably. Just call this a tragic situation. It looks like the commitment to law enforcement may have gone too far and didn’t balance all the facts.

I agree completely, but I haven’t heard of any apologies from the guilty yet.

Obama and Clinton chime in

President Obama appropriately expressed his support for Ahmed and invited him to bring his clock to the White House. This is a wonderful gesture!

Hillary Clinton also tweeted her support, but very few other politicians seemed to have the nerve.

Zero Tolerance rears its evil and destructve head

It’s easy to see this as pure racism, but Robby Soave at Reason.com points out we’d be wrong. It’s probably true that racism was involved, but there’s also another reason for the actions taken by the government officials (teacher, principal, and cops). It’s called Zero Tolerance, and its a danger to kids of all races and religions, both genders and all grades, rich or poor, smart or mentally challenged, or whatever.

Zero tolerance means if a student even appears to do something against a rule, he or she can be punished for it. Guns are forbidden, obviously; but why does a kid get grilled for five hours and then suspended pending psychological evaluation just because he’s holding a pencil and the other kid behind him says he’s “making gun motions” with it? Don’t believe me? Ask this 13-yo Vermont student.

And then there’s 16-yo Alex Stone, a South Carolina student, who just wrote a story and said he had shot a dinosaur with a gun. A DINOSAUR! It was obviously fiction!

His assignment was to write a few paragraphs about himself, as if it were a Facebook status. He decided to fictionalize. “I killed my neighbor’s pet dinosaur, and, then, in the next status I said I bought the gun to take care of the business,” Stone said. Police were called and he also was arrested.

Even zero tolerance disproportionately affects students of color, so it isn’t an alternative to racism; it’s an add-on. It’s an evil, unfair thing designed to relieve teachers and administrators from having to think at the expense of their students; and it’s a danger to all American public school students, just as racism is for some. They must both be abolished.

But back to Ahmed’s case

At a joint press conference with Irving ISD, Chief Larry Boyd said the device — confiscated by an English teacher despite the teen’s insistence that it was a clock — was “certainly suspicious in nature.”

He repeatedly explained that he had made a digital clock, whose alarm just happened to ring at an inopportune time; but the cop thought he wasn’t giving them “reasonable” answers. What was he supposed to say?

School officers questioned Ahmed about the device and why Ahmed had brought it to school. Boyd said Ahmed was then handcuffed “for his safety and for the safety of the officers” and taken to a juvenile detention center. He was later released to his parents, Boyd said.

“The follow-up investigation revealed the device apparently was a homemade experiment, and there’s no evidence to support the perception he intended to create alarm,” Boyd said, describing the incident as a “naive accident.”

Asked if the teen’s religious beliefs factored into his arrest, Boyd said the reaction “would have been the same” under any circumstances.

I tweeted my support for Ahmed Mohamed a few minutes ago. I do very little tweeting, so I hope I did it right.

Most of the time, I’m proud to say I’m a Texan. Sometimes I’m not so sure. I live just a few miles from where this travesty occurred. I’ll be posting more on this as soon as I can collect my information and write it up. Probably tomorrow.

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I am a lover of truth, which is found by a combination of common sense and the methods of science. These “methods of science” include observation, reasoning, testing the validity of one’s reasoning through experiments or further observations, communication with other informed people, and plenty of healthy skepticism. Without these things, there is no truth. There is only superstition. And this is the truth.